Mark Argent > Recent Status Updates

here's a corniness in the book that got me so mad. the protag's contact is named Moke Rahone. rhymes with "pogue mahone", Gaelic for "kiss my ass". funny, kinda obscure for the early, pre-Pogues 1980s, fine fine fine, but mere pages later she throws in a planet called RokeMhone and expects me to not throw the book across the room, like i wouldn't notice such laziness.

i guess i'm reading this. it's competent swashbuckling adventure, heavy on a corny future dialect that makes nods towards linguistic drift but is closer to cockney than AAVE and embarrasses itself when it even glances at the latter. corny is the word. the whole thing is corny. compelling, but corny. so i soldier on.

understand that why i'm not finished with this book after nearly a year, it's that i keep leaving it and coming back to it, rereading favorite passages and chapters, referring to the sourcebook chapters and glossary, devouring the additional material in the Library of America edition. i'm reading this like some folks read the bible.

affecting and emotional personal essays alternating with "old blogger yells at cloud" screeds.

a re-read. i'm always enchanted by this series.

i'm not doing the exercises yet, but i started doing morning pages on 4/1 and i feel...some sort of way. it's good.

i snagged this LOA edition while in the middle of reading the Grafton (UK) edition, and now it's been long enough since i stopped reading that i'll have to start over. please don't throw me in that briar patch, right?

this ethnographic survey of a secondary world is required reading for world-builders who want their personal bar raised.

i feel like this read-through is going to be longer, more in-depth, and more emotionally difficult than the last one.

blew through the pulpy Rocannon's World and Planet of Exile; took a little more time with City of Illusions and am about to move on to The Left Hand of Darkness.

beautiful language, but i keep bouncing off the use of "it" as the pronoun for the multi-gendered shapeshifter. highly unpleasant, like nails down the Mona Lisa.

hit a wall at the hot dog vendor sequence.

while i know Reilly (along w every other character) is meant to be an object of ridicule, he's a little too alt-right to laugh at comfortably in 2017. i'm just a snowflake, i guess.